Long Beach’s Just Like Heaven Festival is a 2009 Pop Lover’s Dream Come True

Are you someone who thinks the best years of music are behind us? Think indie-pop deserves to be making a huge comeback right about now? Did you watch helplessly as mainstream music moved from pop to rap and lose hope that a festival like this would ever happen again? Are you still waiting for Yeah Yeah Yeahs to make a new album? (Well, that one we can’t solve.) If you answered ‘yes’ to every question, sulk no more, as Long Beach’s new Just like Heaven Festival is the perfect event for you.

Set to include Phoenix, Beach House, Washed Out, Passion Pit, and Grizzly Bear (whom you should catch while you can), the inaugural edition of Just Like Heaven is a pop lover’s dream. Since it’s run by Goldenvoice, we suspect that this is why a lot of these great bands were left off this year’s Coachella lineup. In retrospect, it’s better this way: it allows us to hear what we really wanted tickets to Coachella for, but without the long bathroom lines and the overly-glittered high-schoolers running up their parents’ credit card. If you’d like to be hurled into a vortex of nostalgia, with MGMT singing “Kids” (complete with grunting and primal screaming) right before your eyes, here is the link. With such a stellar lineup that has fans on Twitter questioning it’s even real, we’re absolutely sure you don’t want to miss this.

The one-day festival, presented by Coachella’s Goldenvoice, will take place at Long Beach’s Queen Mary Park on Saturday May 4, 2019. We’re quite lucky to be getting all these artists in one place: individual touring around the area is usually non-existent during early summer, as Long Beach is notoriously victim to several radius clauses of the larger (more expensive) festivals in the area. Maybe it’s okay we won’t see any of these at Coachella. We’ll be in heaven anyway.

Tickets go on sale here this Friday, February 8 at 10 AM PST. Check out the full lineup below.